Author: Dublin City Council

As part of Velo-city International Cycling Conference 2019, a new series of audio guides will be developed for Dublin city. Listening to the City will give an introduction to the city for delegates of the conference and an alternative view on the everyday spaces of Dublin’s citizens.

Artist and curator Michelle Browne has commissioned three writers to guide you through the city on wheels. Each will look at the city from a different perspective, free-wheeling through the city and weaving alternative routes and experiences of its streets.

 About the writers:

Louise Bruton is a freelance journalist and wheelchair user based in Dublin. She regularly contributes to the Irish Times and Image Magazine, writing about music, pop culture and disability rights and access to the city. She will bring us on a tour of the city with accessibility in mind. She will show us some good and some not so good places for wheelchair users while bringing us on a journey through the city centre as she experiences it. Louise will consider how Dublin’s built heritage can be a challenge for those with access needs, thinking about how a medieval city can retrofit for the future.

Francis Halsall is co-director of Master Programs, Art in the Contemporary World, at National College of Art and Design, Dublin (www.acw.ie) and Research Fellow at the Department of Art History and Image Studies, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Francis will look at three distinct experiences of cycling in the city. Starting out with the Dublin Bike station at Stephen’s Green, he will look at the variety of transport options in this urban space, considering the interconnectedness of this system and the people who use it. He will look at the phenomenology of cycling for leisure and the sense of freedom of movement in a large open park such as Phoenix Park. Lastly he will look at those who cycle for sport, drawing people to the Sundrive Velodrome where the human and machine become one.

Louise Williams is a writer and radio producer. She is the coordinator of 'Women on Wheels', a voluntary group researching women's experience of cycling in Dublin with Dublin Cycling Campaign. Louise Williams gets on her bike to take in the sounds of the city, asking does a woman experience cycling in Dublin differently to a man? Where do women who cycle fit in the hostile environment of Dublin's streets? Louise explores routes for a care-free cycle along the canal, and records the friction between people on foot, on two wheels and on four wheels as she plots a route from the canal across the River Liffey to the Convention Centre.

Listening to the City is curated by Michelle Browne as part of The Citizen Cycle, a series of art commissions produced to coincide with the Velo-city International Cycling Conference in June and is funded by The Arts Council, Watershed’s Creative Producers International Investment Fund, and Dublin City Council. The Citizen Cycle puts citizens at the heart of the conversation about cycling and infrastructure in the city. It asks: how is our city designed and used, how we can plan and share the built environment for the health and wellbeing of all.

The audio-guides will be available to download from Soundcloud and a link to this will be on the Velo-city delegate App. 

 Michelle Browne will present on this project and other projects included in the Citizens Cycle at the Bike Parade Festival in St. Anne’s Park. For more information on this initiative follow The Citizen Cycle on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

For more information on the Velo-city Programme, Exhibition and Registration go to: https://www.velo-city2019.com 
Sign up for our newsletter: https://abbey.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=fd5fa9b846888ef25e85f1973&id=75273fab2e
Follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn